While Google Now is pretty darn smart already, it usually has to take its time or come across incidental information and churn on it before letting you know in a Now card. With Google Now on Tap, it’s putting out what it gets in with a long press of the home button.

Now on Tap is still a new feature that isn’t as fully-fleshed as its stewed edition — using algorithms to perform tricks live on an expanded array of applications just ain’t the same. It’s catching up, though, especially with some updates today.

Ericsson used to have a larger footprint in the mobile technology space. In this decade, we’re lucky if we hear from them once or twice a year. This time around, our luck may have run out if we’re talking about smartphones. It’s a hardware field that Google currently has a vested interest in. Not to worry, though, as one of its software managers has come up with her vision of what’s next.

Doom for the devices

Stockholm-based Ericsson commissioned a survey of 100,000 participants across 40 countries including Sweden and has found that people will [...]

Google usually has a quick post ready for one of its many project blogs to tell users and developers of a great new feature that they should look forward to. Not the case this time. An update to the Google app for Android apparently brought nothing worth noting. Not even in the update log on the Play Store page.

The /r/Android subreddit tends to disagree. One of its users was the herald to a new audible feature that can read out your latest text messages.

This is the place where you and only you can listen to every single request you made. Well, supposedly. And if supposedly is what you’re worried about, read on to find out how to protect yourself.

Each utterance of “OK Google,” every tap of that red mic icon, your phone records a clip of you saying whatever you’re saying (savory or not). It then sends it off to Google’s servers to process your command and deliver your results (desired or not). It also keeps that clip in your Google Voice & Audio Activity log.

No, I’m not talking about their sound. I mean, sure, developers can definitely help relating voice assistants’ with the average user by fine-tuning their voices to sound like people and not cyborgs. I think, though, that they should retain some robotic quality so that users clearly know what they’re interacting with as opposed to who.

How Google Now, Siri, Cortana, or any other voice service interacts with you is more important. Important to you, the person who wants data from the internet. It’s most important to the companies behind the services which [...]

Hound is SoundHound’s new voice assistant to compete with the likes of Google Now, Siri, and Cortana. It, like the others, can launch apps, run search queries, identify songs, and more, but one thing that’s caught wide attention for this service is its ability to process complex, multi-part queries in a manner similar to Wolfram Alpha. Questions like “What is the population and capital for Japan and China?” work without a hitch, and very quickly at that.

But rarely will most people ask a voice assistant such complicated questions. Instead, most people use [...]

Nearly every member of the Pocketnow team uses digital personal assistants in some way. Whether it’s Google Now, Siri, or Cortana, these systems offer voice commands, as well as personalized recommendations based on contextual information like location or emails. But while each service has its own unique features that set it apart from the others, none of them offer the same kind of fully fledged, natural language-based voice interface found on services like Wolfram Alpha.

SoundHound recently demoed a new product, simply called Hound, that seems to offer similar [...]